Monday, 28 October 2013

After our recent screenings in Brazil and Los Angeles I've had quite a few emails asking about the making of The Last Belle, and the production's history. A lot of the answers are here in this blog, but anyone could be forgiven for not finding them as they're scattered over 100 or so articles from the past 2 years. So, notwithstanding those of you who have been with this blog from the start (and Thank You if you have), here's my summary of some of the highlights from the past 24 months:

The ancient - and almost dead - art of bespoke hand lettering. Thanks to Mr Mark Naisbitt it is still alive and kicking. For more on how Mark designed the lettering for The Last Belle click on Hand Lettering.

Hi-diddle-dee-dee, an actor I never will be. But thank goodness for those that do have the talent to step in front of the microphone. For more on this click on Performance.

Sam Spacey did all the hand tracing for the film; for more on her beautiful contributions click on Tracing

The London location became just as much a character in the film as the characters themselves. For more on how the locations were researched click On Location and More On Location...

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And finally, a couple of my sporadic rants from the blog. This one sums up my whole relationship between film and digital, traditional crafts versus the cutting-edge, and how we applied all this to The Last Belle. Please click on Is Film Dead? And this one is my message in a bottle to any reader thinking of making their first film - What We Can Learn From Pins.

For all the other goodies - deleted scenes, old sketches, how characters were designed, and so on - then I can only suggest pouring yourself a very large coffee, or setting off an exceptionally large render, and flicking backwards through these pages at your leisure...

I hope this potted guide helps our newest readers. And there will be more new stuff to come, shortly... Thanks for reading, and for writing in!

Thursday, 10 October 2013

Exciting news to hear that the amazing score to The Last Belle, composed by the equally amazing Stuart Hancock, has been nominated at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards﻿ !

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The awards ceremony will take place at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, California, on November 21st. Best of luck to Stuart, and all the wonderful musicians who created the score. I've said it before on this blog, but I'll say it again: watching, and hearing, the music coming to life on the recording stage was one of the absolute highlights in the whole process of bringing this film to life. To create emotions, seemingly out of thin air, is true magic to me.

For those of you new to this blog, HERE is some behind-the-scenes footage of the score being recorded.

About Me

Neil Boyle is the award-winning director of 'The Last Belle', a 20 minute animated short featuring two characters journeying towards a blind date: WALLY who suffers a nightmarish drunken trip across London as he races against the clock to the rendezvous; and ROSIE who waits in a bar dreaming of how wonderful her date is going to be... if he ever shows up.
'The Last Belle' features the voice talents of Sienna Guillory (The Time Machine, Resident Evil), Colin McFarlane (The Dark Knight, Torchwood) and Amanda Donohoe (Castaway, L.A. Law). The music is by award winning composer Stuart Hancock. The producer is Rebecca Neville.
For more info on The Last Belle visit our website at www.thelastbelle.com
Neil is currently developing a feature-length film of Michael Morpurgo's award-winning book 'Kensuke's Kingdom' with co-director Kirk Hendry, screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, and producer Sarah Radclyffe.